Fear of uncertainty is natural and human. Few of us would be happy not knowing when we or our loved ones could eat again, or whether bombs might drop on us tonight.

Yet some people joyously embrace particular uncertain situations, seeing opportunities to exercise and hone their skills. Others detest all uncertainty and seek to deny it or will it away.

Many managers discourage behaviour that exposes uncertainty. They don’t want to hear about risks, and they don’t like people asking too many questions. In their minds, discovery and exploration promote uncertainty because they’re unpredictable and uncontrollable. They seek absolutes even for Agile projects:

Agile practitioners know that uncertainty is inescapable in software development (as in life), and it is better to embrace it on our projects than to run away from it. There are no best practices, and the only responsible answer is usually, “It depends.” It’s our job to expose uncertainty, and to help reduce it when possible.

But Agile practitioners are not immune to human feelings. We also can fall into denial and too-easy answers.

In this interactive workshop, we’ll do group exercises and debriefs to tackle the questions:

How can we grow our own tolerance for uncertainty and learn to embrace it?

How can we promote a healthy attitude to uncertainty on our Agile projects?

Outline/structure of the Session

Following an introduction, the workshop consists of 2 principal small group exercises, each followed by a debrief. Each exercise is allocated 30 minutes, typically 20 minutes for the exercise and 10 minutes for the debrief. Depending on the number of participants and the energy in the room (which will drive the length of the debriefs), there could potentially be a 3rd exercise -- but at other conferences this has always ended up as a suggestion for each individual to follow up with after the workshop. The session ends with an overall debrief focusing on what participants plan to do at work with what they've learned in the workshop.

10-minute introduction, with general discussion

what do we think is “healthy uncertainty”?

are all software projects characterized by uncertainty?

if so, why

what are some of the negative ways people (managers, team members) react to project uncertainty

why are they uncomfortable (causes of discomfort)

Exercise 1: Communicating about uncertainty

Given the question, "How can we communicate project uncertainty honestly in a way that will help people hear and deal with it?"

Each group works to suggest at least 3 ways we could improve communication about uncertainty

Exercise 2: Growing our own tolerance for uncertainty

Given the question, "How can we learn to be comfortable (or at least not too uncomfortable) with uncertainty on our projects and in our lives?"

Each group works to outline some things we can do in our everyday lives and work to help ourselves feel more secure and grow our tolerance for uncertainty wherever we find it.

Final debrief

Suggested takeaway exercise is for each individual to draw -- in any way meaningful to them -- their own support network, i.e., the things in their lives (people, places, activities…) that help them to feel secure and supported.

Learning Outcome

My aim is for each participant to leave with tips and techniques for dealing with project uncertainty positively, and without undue anxiety or stress

recognizing that some level of uncertainty is inevitable at some or all stages of most projects

communicating uncertainty -- and the ways we intend to manage/mitigate it -- honestly to stakeholders

recognizing and reinforcing their own strengths for managing uncertainty

Target Audience

all Agile practitioners, at any level (I've said intermediate above, but the workshop is useful for experts and beginners too)

Gillian Lee - Teams Want a Quick Game to Learn How to Deliver Value Faster

schedule 6 months ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Agile helps you to deliver what’s valuable to the customer faster. You can capture, prioritize, communicate, and deliver that value with good user stories. In our experience, a major impediment to writing good user stories in the real word is a lack of example stories. We have created a set of games that incorporate 80 examples of good and bad user stories. The games are easy to learn, play, and teach so that you can experience good user stories in just a few minutes. Come play the games and then share them with your friends and co-workers!

schedule 6 months ago

40 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

A face-to-face conversation is the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team. So states the sixth principle of the Agile Manifesto.

Reality comes with a big "however." Work-at-home, outsourcing and inter-company partnerships mean that, more and more, we find ourselves n meetings where other participants are not in the same room. They may be around the corner or around the world. Some organizations invest in powerful tools to make this arrangement work well - or, sometimes, not so well. Others make do with audio only. Are we fooling ourselves when we call these events "meetings?" Maybe. Yet they're part of our world, so why not make the most of them?

In this lively session, you'll examine a proven pattern for facilitation, discover ways to overcome the challenges of virtual meetings and learn techniques that encourage meaningful participation. Most of these require more focus and ingenuity than expense.

Sue will share some of the techniques she learned as a teleworking pioneer in the '90s and a trainer of coaches, via distance, since 2003. Join us to explore ways you can bring your meetings with remote participants to life and respect everyone's time - including your own.

schedule 6 months ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Effective interactions, between product owners and designers and team members who develop and make those products real, are key to team, product and organizational success. It's reflected in the first value of the Agile Manifesto.

Still, one of the chief complaints, from both the product side and the dev side, is poor communication. The list of irritants includes: lack of clarity, lack of understanding, lack of time, lack of access, too many meetings, too much jargon, too many badly written user stories and too many people involved.

Communication isn''t the only obstacle, but it’s a big one - and it can be overcome with no cost or organizational disruption.

Regardless of the role we play on the team, part of everyone’s job is to create shared understanding. In this session, Marilyn, an experienced product owner and product manager, and Sue, a communication specialist and coach, will share their research about communication gaps in the product-development relationship and approaches that can close the gap. Join them to explore tips and ideas to improve communication flow and help teams move from concept to cash.

NOTE TO TAC TEAMBecause we are doing some original research on this topic, I would like to include a co-presenter, Marilyn Powers, PEng, who, at the time of posting, is not yet on confengine. Info about her is available at https://www.linkedin.com/in/marilynpowers

Here is more biographical info about Marilyn:Marilyn has more than 10 years experience bringing products and services to market as a Product Manager. As a licensed professional engineer, she has experience working in a variety of fields, from manufacturing to operations to simulation to SAAS software. Currently, Marilyn is a Product Manager at D2L, a leading Ed-tech company, where she works closely with Product Owners, Dev teams, Designers, Senior Leaders and many other stakeholders to deliver quality software tools to educational institutions and corporations who value learning and development. Her expertise is creating shared understanding between diverse groups, be it external customer advisory groups or internal stakeholders.

Previous presentations or workshopsMarilyn has presented at a variety of conferences over the past 20 years, the career highlight of which was a live demo on the main stage keynote at the D2L Fusion 2016 conference. Other conference presentations included Online Learning Conference ( New Orleans, LA 2017), Fusion (2015, 2016), Learning Impact Leadership Institute (San Antonio, TX 2016), Industrial Engineering Student Conference (Kitchener, 2016), ModSim World Canada (Montreal, 2010), Montreal Neurological Institute Day (Montreal, 2009), McGill University invited speaker on Haptics (Montreal, 2006). Prior to these presentations, Marilyn was an Instructor of Engineering at Mount Royal University in Calgary, AB.

Ellen Grove - Asking Over Telling: Using Humble Inquiry to Build Great Teams

schedule 6 months ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

More asking, less telling. As an agile leader, adopt the approach of humble enquiry to build relationships, increase trust and collaboration, and deal with the challenges of organizational transformations.

"Humble enquiry is the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person." - Edgar H. Schein

Working in an agile way asks us to rethink how we relate to each other as we tackle complex problems and challenge the traditional structures of our organizations. Humble enquiry - the art of asking instead of telling - is a critical skill for agilists who seek to improve collaboration and address difficult problems head on. Inspired by Edgar H. Schein's book 'Humble Enquiry, this workshop will teach you the fundamentals of how to do more asking and less telling. Through mini-lectures and interactive exercises, we'll discuss the different types of questioning, consider the forces around and within us that inhibit our ability to ask instead of tell, and examine how this powerful technique can improve collaboration within agile teams as well as help to address some of the challenges of agile transformations.

Charles Maddox - Success Patterns with Scaling Lean-Agile

schedule 6 months ago

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40 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

From actual field experience helping organizations with adopting Lean-Agile at scale, I have observed some patterns of success and anti-patterns that I would like to share. These patterns have to do with how Leadership and the Lean-Agile Center of excellence contribute successfully or unsuccessfully for success at scaling. We discuss how they both need to exhibit some fundamental areas of leadership that are referenced directly from the book The Leadership Challenge, by Kouzes and Posner. In the session, we will discuss the areas of leadership referenced in the book and how they come to life successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully in the organization. The examples that are given the session in tandem with the book can be used as a clear guide on scaling success in the large enterprise.

toddcharron - I'd Buy That For A Dollar

schedule 6 months ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Beginner

What happens if we build it and they don’t come?

Building features no one cares about is not only bad because the feature isn’t getting used, but is also a wasted opportunity that could have been used to build something truly valuable for your customers.

But how would we know?

In many companies, features get prioritized by the HiPPO principle (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). As it turns out, this is often not the most effective way to prioritize your backlog.

But if not this, then what?

In this workshop we explore what value is, how to talk about it, and how we might measure the value we have achieved.

Howard Deiner - How We Get Agile Transformations Wrong By Trying to Do It All So Right

schedule 7 months ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Sorry to say it guys, but Agile has gone limp over the last few years.As we get more and more coaches into the mix, both external as well as internal, organizations somehow have forgotten that it’s software that we’re trying to produce.Not great stand-ups.

Technical practices matter.In fact, if we could dispense with ALL process and still create the valuable quality software that is needed, we should do that.From a Lean perspective, process adds no customer facing value.But getting rid of all process is crazy talk.Even Fred George, who promoted “Programmer Anarchy” several years ago never got away from all process.In reality, his movement was premised on driving business decision making directly into technical decision making, and completely empowering teams to “be” the company.He premised the concept of “Programmer Anarchy” on using the best and brightest developers out there, and trusting that if they could do something as difficult as create great code that they could do the business decision making as well.

But perhaps we don’t have the absolute best talent out there.Perhaps it’s hard to lure people away from Google and Facebook because of the money and the chance to get great work environment and unbelievable work challenges (change the world, anyone?)Does that mean that we have to go back into the Fredrick Winslow Taylor world view of “The One Best Way”?With that way becoming making a choice between Scrum, SAFe, Lean/Kanban, and other development processes?

I’d like to convince you that what’s going to work for your organization and your employees is something in the middle.I, of course, lean into the “better technical practices will yield better outcomes” frame of mind.You may as well.But when Garrison Keillor said, on “A Prairie Home Companion” (a long running radio show on National Public Radio in the States), “Well, that's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average”, that was satire!And the same is true of your organization.It can logically be true that all organizations’ developers are all above average.But we can hold people to an acceptable level of technical practices that will yield in writing better code than merely having a process that talks about writing better code.

Dave Sharrock - Epic Budgeting - or how agile teams meet deadlines

schedule 6 months ago

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40 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

According to this year's State of Agile survey, the most common success measure for agile initiatives, at 53%, is on-time delivery. But if agile teams can choose how much work they take into a sprint, how can teams be sure of delivering pre-committed scope on time and on budget? There is more to agile delivery than product owners ordering a backlog of work for teams to work on.

Epic budgeting is one tool that allows the product owner to steer a product across the line, delivering the expected scope on time by managing scope creep or an unsustainable focus on the perfect over the pragmatic. During this session learn about how product owners and their teams work towards a fixed date or budget by applying double loop learning to epic sizing and breakdown. Expect some tales from real companies and a few light hearted moments. And I'm at least 53% certain we will finish on time!

thomasjeffrey - Scaling Agile without the scaling framework

schedule 6 months ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Advanced

Increasingly Agile adoption has focused on how to operate larger enterprises with agility, and run larger and larger initiatives, at scale.

In many cases, organizations have turned to explicit agile scaling frameworks to address their needs to coordinate increasingly larger efforts to deliver value in a way of that does not sacrifice feedback and self organization . Often these frameworks attempt to address the complexity that comes with large scale by adding extra process and procedure. Prescriptive advice is prescribed in the form of additional roles, stages, gates, and methods. This approach to scaling bears more than a little similarity to the heavy weight methods of the past, but in this case merging agile terminology with much of the same framework bloat and bureaucracy we have seen in the past.

As a a result adoptees struggle to understand how to fit these frameworks to their context, and seasoned coaches struggle to wrestle out the good bits.

During this session I will discuss a different approach to scaling agile, one that places an emphasis on both mindset and practice. I'll pay particular attention to the topic of leadership, organizational design, and the role management has to play in designing a system of work that allows larger efforts to work with an agile mindset without being forced into a one size fits all process framework.

A key part of the discussion will be to showcase how core agile methods and techniques can be extended and expanded to successfully manage coordinated agile deployments that range from hundreds to thousands of FTEs. I'll present these techniques by using real examples of agile deployments I have been a part of during my work with ScotiaBank's agile journey.

Key Scaling Practices covered will include:- The design components required to structure your organization based on demand- How to continuously de-scale your organization- "Get Out Of the Boardroom" style governance and leadership- Operational cadences and Impediment Escalation Flow- Managing the flow of value at the Business Technology Asset level - Moving the conversation from stories to domains- Streamlining finance and budgeting to align to the agile mindset

I hope to illustrate ways that both management and knowledge workers can select techniques that allow them to scale agile as needed to support ever larger initiatives without succumbing to a one size fits all framework that does not adapt constant change.

Andrew Annett - Your Team Is An Object; What's its API?

schedule 6 months ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

We constantly talk about the value of communication but seldom in terms to which technical teams tend to relate. This session will use the object model, messages and the RESTful architectural style to examine how a development team might interact successfully (or not) with other elements in its system.

We'll discuss systems thinking, message-based communication, software development as a service. To illustrate these ideas we'll map REST actions to team practices.

schedule 6 months ago

90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

What is leadership agility and how can we cultivate it in our organizations and in our lives?

How is organizational agility constrained by leadership agility?

Ann-Marie will lead you on an exploration of these questions and more. You will learn about staged growth development leadership and how taking an integral approach to our leadership produces more effective leaders.

This workshop is based on the work of Bill Joiner & Stephen Josephs who authored Leadership Agility: five levels of mastery for anticipating and initiating change.

schedule 6 months ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Agile failure is most felt by Scrum Masters. Why do so many fail to properly support their teams? Why do so many fail to inspire meaningful change in the level of leadership? Why do so many fail to guide transformation in their organisations?

In this workshop, we will harness the knowledge and experience of the participants!

Why?Because everyone can contribute to the learning of the entire group. It will dynamic, full or energy, and joyful - woohoo!

Who can benefit the most from the session and the power of harnessing the group?

Scrum Masters that are struggling to do this role well

Leaders that are not seeing the results needed for an effective Scrum team through a weak/unskilled Scrum Master

Agile coaches that are coaching Scrum Masters without meaningful or consistent results

Project managers trying to make the transition to becoming a successful Scrum Master

This workshop will use concepts and the model from the book "Influencer"

Prepare to work together to co-discover the Scrum Master vital behaviours!

Many people are taking on the mantle of Scrum Masters across agile teams around the world. Unfortunately, many of them have come from more traditional work structures that don't develop effective Scrum Masters. There is a misconception about the purpose of a Scrum Master. Often the Scrum Master becomes the facilitator or the project manager. This has to stop. Effective leaders, agile coaches, and Scrum Masters take advantage of vital behaviours in supporting scrum masters or by building mastery within these behaviours.

During this workshop, participants will go through a series of exercises to identify the purpose of a Scrum Master, how we can measure success, identify potential vital behaviours, learn from others to determine the vital behaviours, and then create a sound influence strategy to enable effective Scrum Masters and the work that they do. This workshop will use concepts and the model from the book "Influencer" (by Joseph Grenny et all) which details the three (3) keys to a successful change initiative and uses the six (6) sources of influence.

Prepare to work together to co-discover the Scrum Master vital behaviours!

Shahin Sheidaei / Shawn Button - Community-Driven Change

schedule 7 months ago

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40 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Many organizations flatten management structure when they transform to agile. It soon becomes obvious that important activities done by managers are still needed. A community can fill these gaps. They can provide morale, governance, learning, and mentorship, recruiting and hiring, mutual support, coordination, sharing, innovation and more!

Unfortunately few companies manage to create a strong community. Even fewer empower that community to fill these gaps. This means they are missing the ultimate benefit of community: a strong, empowered community can transform the organization itself!

Join Shahin and Shawn in this interactive session to explore communities in organizations. Examine the benefits of building great communities. Learn how to spark the community, and how to support it as it evolves. Hear stories of communities empowered to improve the organization. Learn how to make a community into a driver of positive change.

schedule 7 months ago

60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Since the goal of all for-profit companies is to make profit, how effect is performance review in actually contributing to your business goal?

In this session, we will go through some activities to explore the hidden side of performance appraisal process, along with some story-telling and discussions on our perspectives.

Last but not least, there will be some suggestions on things that we can do in place of the traditional performance review.

If you want to unmask the mystery behind performance reviewIf the current performance appraisal process is one of your pain points, orIf you have experience and stories to share with us regarding performance evaluation, then come to this session and let's have a conversation

Ardita Karaj / Cheezy - What's my MVP?

schedule 7 months ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Are you having trouble finding a small Minimum Viable Product? You've heard about delivering in small, incremental releases, you've tried to chisel out a small slice out of the big product you have to deliver, but what you get is not viable and there's no incremental thinking around releases. Why is this so?

Join Ardi and Cheezy for this session where they will give you some tips and tricks on how to create your first MVP and then look down the road for future ones. They will give some examples from their experiences and challenges when dealing with teams that believe MVP does not apply to them.

You will leave this session with some ideas on how to prepare the strategy for your MVPs, how to work with your team to find your small product that is viable and still delivers value, and understand how to organize your efforts to deliver the product incrementally.

schedule 7 months ago

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40 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Ever been in a situation when the Product Manager comes and asks for “a couple of small changes that are high priority” and the team says “They’re kind of big. Which one do you want first? Really, really!”. “I want them all! As soon as possible.”.

There are many directions one can go from here. One can work harder or work smarter. While you probably know ways to work harder, but let’s explore ways to work smarter.

In this talk Ardita will share techniques that she has used which produce good results. She will talk about Product management, technical backbone, collaboration and how all to get Product managers and teams “singing” together in harmony and with focus.

Dave Dame - Coaching Leadership in an Agile Transformation

schedule 7 months ago

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40 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

How do you coach leaders in an agile transformation? How does coaching this group differ from coaching on an agile team? How do you coach Leadership as their peer? Agile is always thought of as being ‘down in the delivery layer’ of organizations. But, for us to be truly successful in embracing agility, we need to be more inclusive of all decision makers in the organization. That starts at the top. There are lot of cultural elements and tools that need to be changed across the organization. This requires dedicated change agents to be positioned within the environment of senior leaders to help them embrace agility in their everyday and strategic decision making. Most people want to do the right thing – it’s all about coaching so that, in the moments where our intentions and our decisions are tested by the status quo, we can help our leaders evaluate their choices. This means being a constant influencer, mirror and educator. And, it means sometimes you have to let things go. Successfully coaching leaders through agile transformation requires very purposeful influencing. In this session, we will discuss how to help bring senior leaders along an agile change journey as well as the primary challenges you are likely to encounter along the way and proven mechanisms to help you push through.

Jess Long - Kaizen Land - Gamifying Stand Up and Overcoming Anti Patterns

schedule 7 months ago

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40 Mins

Experience Report

Intermediate

Learn how the gingerbread men are taking over the daily Stand Up and forever changing the mornings of teams everywhere.

Have your Daily Stand-Ups become stale? We’ll talk through the evolution of an idea that ended up demolishing monotony, obliterating anti-patterns and spawning smiles… and to think, it all started when my daughter and I were playing Candy Land!

We’ll talk through the implementation of a game board during one team’s stand up through the infectious adoption and evolution of its existence. You’ll hear how teams tackled some of their greatest impediments and helped build a zone of psychological safety all while having fun.

By the end of this session, you’ll be prepared to bring this back to your team and create your own success stories.

schedule 8 months ago

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40 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

These days, almost every organization is showing interest in Agile. We seem to have all the ingredients for effective transformations: well-known practices, detailed processes, ever-improving tools, extensive literature, myriad certifications, and many consultants. How is it, then, that so few organizations are truly agile?

Gil Broza, author of “The Agile Mindset” and “The Human Side of Agile”, thinks that one particular ingredient has been overlooked in the mad rush to adopt Agile. In this session, he leads us on an exploration of that ingredient and its place in an Agile transformation.